Aurelius Vasiliou looked at his son-in-law with a hardened gaze.
The scorching steam of THE Vasiliou Primordial Spring rolled between them, and for a long moment the Patriarch simply stared at the smiling tyrant soaking in his lineage's most sacred waters, the tyrant who had just asked to take one of their ancestors home the way a guest asks to take home leftovers!
Then Aurelius waved his hand.
From the golden depths below, one of the pristine skeletons stirred! It was a particularly dim one, its bones holding only the faintest ghost of the radiance its brothers still carried, an ancestor whose fade had been long and whose generation had been nearly all given away, and it floated up through the bubbling lava-waters slowly and grandly until it hovered between the two men, dripping liquid gold.
"Existence is give and take," Aurelius said.
"So far, you have taken my daughter, my patience, and now this."
The dim golden skeleton drifted toward Noah!
